A new article describes an experiment that illustrates how the classical method for the reconstruction of unattested languages can also be used to predict hitherto undocumented words in poorly ...

Randy J. LaPolla is in the School of Humanities, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore 639818, Singapore. Historical linguists seek to determine the relationships between languages, and usually ...

Of course, it's impossible to provide an exact number of words in English, since new words are being added to the dictionary, and falling out of use, pretty much constantly. But what's an approximate ...

In 1884 the anthropologist Franz Boas returned from Baffin Island with a discovery that would kick off decades of linguistic wrangling: by his count, the local Inuit language had four words for snow, ...

Guillaume Thierry has received funding from the European Research Council, the Economic and Social Research Council, the British Academy, the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the Biotechnology ...

Ted Gibson receives funding from the linguistics program at the National Science Foundation, Award 1534318. Bevil Conway receives funding from the Intramural Research Program of the National Eye ...